Posts :: tech (rss)

I'm a software engineer at the Nucleic Acid Observatory working in bioinformatics. I used to work on webpage optimization and ads at Google, and am still interested in web browsers, web APIs, and improving privacy/security/efficiency by adding new capabilities to browsers.

• Benchmarking Bowtie2 Threading
  December 01, 2023
• Losing Metaphors: Zip and Paste
  November 29, 2023
• Process Substitution Without Shell?
  November 28, 2023
• Detecting What's Been Seen
  November 23, 2023
• Portable Chargers are Great
  November 21, 2023
• Facebook is Paying Me to Post
  November 14, 2023
• Public Weights?
  November 01, 2023
• Computational Approaches to Pathogen Detection
  October 31, 2023
• Simple Terminal Colors
  October 09, 2023
• Linking Alt Accounts
  October 06, 2023
• PortAudio M1 Latency
  October 04, 2023
• My Mid-Career Transition into Biosecurity
  October 02, 2023
• Feedly Breaks MathML
  September 25, 2023
• Hand-writing MathML
  September 23, 2023
• Inline Plotting in iTerm2
  September 14, 2023
• Cleaning a SoundCraft Mixer
  August 31, 2023
• Biosecurity Culture, Computer Security Culture
  August 30, 2023
• State of Generally Available Self-Driving
  August 22, 2023
• Bad Imitation Instruments
  August 02, 2023
• Accidentally Load Bearing
  July 13, 2023
• Lightweight minimal speech recognition?
  July 12, 2023
• 3D Printed Talkbox Cap
  July 08, 2023
• AI Intermediation
  July 05, 2023
• MXR Talkbox Cap?
  July 04, 2023
• Approaches to Thump
  June 19, 2023
• Looking Back On Ads
  June 14, 2023
• You Don't Always Need Indexes
  May 25, 2023
• Facebook Increased Visibility
  May 15, 2023
• Violin Supports
  May 07, 2023
• Moving VPS Again
  May 04, 2023
• AWS Has Raised Prices Before
  April 03, 2023
• Reproject on Cropping
  March 25, 2023
• Abusing Snap Circuits IC
  March 05, 2023
• Measuring Ads Opt-Out Compliance
  March 03, 2023
• Bus-Only Bus Lane Enforcement
  February 17, 2023
• Lessons From TryContra
  February 15, 2023
• Help Update TryContra
  February 14, 2023
• Does the AGPL Work?
  February 13, 2023
• How Cardioid Are Cardioids?
  February 12, 2023
• Misleading Fast Charging Specs
  February 04, 2023
• How Likely is Losing a Google Account?
  January 29, 2023
• Reverse RSS Stats
  January 28, 2023
• Consider Trying Dictation
  January 22, 2023
• Ad Fraud Detection Prediction Market
  January 17, 2023
• Tesla Model 3 Review
  January 16, 2023
• Wolf Incident Postmortem
  January 08, 2023
• Can Ads be GDPR Compliant?
  January 07, 2023
• Opening Facebook Links Externally
  January 04, 2023
• Localhost Security Messaging
  December 31, 2022
• Privacy Tradeoffs
  December 28, 2022
• Zooming the Chrome Audio Player
  December 27, 2022
• Not Getting Hacked
  December 21, 2022
• Logging Shell History in Zsh
  December 20, 2022
• Wider Default Audio Player in Chrome?
  December 11, 2022
• Machine Learning Consent
  December 07, 2022
• Can GPT-3 Write Contra Dances?
  December 03, 2022
• Mastodon's Dubious Crawler Exemption
  November 27, 2022
• Mastodon Replies as Comments
  November 17, 2022
• Better Mastodon Aliases
  November 15, 2022
• Improving Emergency Vehicle Utilization
  November 14, 2022
• User-Controlled Algorithmic Feeds
  November 12, 2022
• Mastodon Linking Norms
  November 10, 2022
• Trying Mastodon
  November 08, 2022
• Thinking About Mastodon
  November 07, 2022
• Multiple Deploy-Key Repos
  November 03, 2022
• Lazy Python Argument Parsing
  November 02, 2022
• Deepfake(?) Phishing
  October 21, 2022
• Why So Many Cookie Banners?
  October 09, 2022
• Failed Adventures in Delay
  September 19, 2022
• Remote Login For Turnkey Devices?
  September 17, 2022
• Sequencing Intro II: Adapters
  September 14, 2022
• Prototyping in C
  September 04, 2022
• Exporting Hangouts History
  September 02, 2022
• Built-In Bundling For Faster Loading
  August 30, 2022
• History of Zero-based Months?
  August 24, 2022
• Digital Dinner Signup
  August 22, 2022
• Duplicating Rasberry Pi Images
  August 17, 2022
• Careful with Caching
  August 07, 2022
• Hiring Programmers in Academia
  July 24, 2022
• House Phone
  June 21, 2022
• Microphone on Electric Mandolin II
  June 06, 2022
• Microphone on Electric Mandolin
  May 09, 2022
• Emacs Recentering With Context
  April 13, 2022
• Foot-Chording Chords
  April 07, 2022
• Terminal Preferences
  April 04, 2022
• Balancing Audio in Software
  March 06, 2022
• Don't Let Personal Domains Expire
  March 05, 2022
• Does Impedance Matter?
  February 14, 2022
• Playing With a Talk Box
  February 03, 2022
• Infant Talk boxes?
  January 30, 2022
• Mildly Photochromic Lenses?
  January 28, 2022
• Wireless Outlet Switching
  January 24, 2022
• Browser Engines
  December 03, 2021
• Experience with Cue Covid Testing
  November 30, 2021
• Snoo App Thoughts
  November 28, 2021
• Giving Up On T-Mobile
  November 21, 2021
• Highlighting New Comments
  November 07, 2021
• T-Mobile: Spurious Account Takeover Warning
  October 23, 2021
• Why Not a Natural Gas Generator?
  October 08, 2021
• Designing Low Upkeep Software
  September 25, 2021
• Auto-Downloder Chrome Extension
  September 18, 2021
• Handling Identical USB Sound Cards
  September 10, 2021
• Selecting the Default Browser in Facebook on Android
  September 08, 2021
• Moving Away From The GPL
  August 05, 2021
• Pi Sound Box
  July 19, 2021
• Essentialness of Data
  July 13, 2021
• Firefox does not block analytics by default
  July 10, 2021
• Whistle Synth Pi
  July 08, 2021
• To the Robobassinet and Progress
  June 21, 2021
• Who wants to run a B2B SaaS startup?
  June 17, 2021
• Better Whistle Synth
  June 08, 2021
• Why Prefetch Is Broken
  May 27, 2021
• Kids NCurses Messenger
  May 22, 2021
• Solar Production Data
  May 19, 2021
• Testing the FLEDGE Prototype
  May 12, 2021
• Android Video with External Microphone
  May 08, 2021
• Thoughts on Ad Blocking
  May 05, 2021
• Why I Work on Ads
  May 02, 2021
• Making a Kingfisher Video
  March 13, 2021
• Weirdly Long DNS Switchover?
  February 16, 2021
• Bucket Brigade Updates
  February 13, 2021
• We Need Browsers as Platforms
  February 09, 2021
• History of the Public Suffix List
  February 07, 2021
• Looking at RSS User-Agents
  February 04, 2021
• Browser Audio Latency
  February 02, 2021
• Bucket Brigade: Video
  January 02, 2021
• New Bucket Brigade UI
  December 23, 2020
• Secular Solstice 2020
  December 20, 2020
• Heel-and-toe drumming
  December 10, 2020
• Switching to Google Calendar
  December 09, 2020
• Velocity-sensitive electronic drum pedals
  December 08, 2020
• Giving Tuesday 2020
  November 30, 2020
• DIY Beaterless Drum Pedals
  November 28, 2020
• Debug Headers with GET
  November 17, 2020
• Brigaded Rounds
  November 16, 2020
• Sharding the Brigade
  November 13, 2020
• Yes to Feature Requests, No to Entitlement
  November 10, 2020
• Teach People to Recognize the Sound of Covid?
  November 06, 2020
• Bucket Brigade Singing
  November 03, 2020
• Muting on Group Calls
  October 02, 2020
• WebBundles and URL Randomization
  August 26, 2020
• How to set up foot pedals
  August 23, 2020
• Setting Up a Green Screen
  August 14, 2020
• Effect of Numpy
  August 09, 2020
• Evaluating Opus
  August 08, 2020
• Preview On Hover
  June 24, 2020
• Keep: Move checked items to bottom
  June 10, 2020
• Shutting Down RegularlyScheduled
  May 29, 2020
• Wrist Issues
  May 28, 2020
• Wrapping and Centering
  May 21, 2020
• Running Wired Ethernet
  May 13, 2020
• Setting up a new Mac
  May 11, 2020
• AudioWorklet Latency: Firefox vs Chrome
  May 06, 2020
• Retracting on Facebook
  April 23, 2020
• Wired Headsets for Video Calls
  April 21, 2020
• Bass Whistle in the Browser
  April 19, 2020
• Web Audio Echo?
  April 18, 2020
• Just Top Post
  April 14, 2020
• The Typing Game
  April 13, 2020
• Ethernet Is Worth It For Video Calls
  April 11, 2020
• Mosh
  April 07, 2020
• Overhead of MessageChannel
  March 27, 2020
• Making a Standing Desk
  March 07, 2020
• More Rhythm Options
  Jannuary 31, 2020
• Porting My Rhythm Setup
  January 25, 2020
• Fiddle Effects Tech
  January 17, 2020
• Folding Couch Monitor
  December 30, 2019
• Programmers Should Plan For Lower Pay
  December 28, 2019
• Pixel 3a Review
  December 21, 2019
• LW For External Comments?
  December 06, 2019
• Comment, Don't Message
  November 18, 2019
• Uber Self-Driving Crash
  November 07, 2019
• Lite Blocking
  November 05, 2019
• Shared Cache is Going Away
  November 01, 2019
• Internet Distance
  October 28, 2019
• Why "Referer"?
  October 23, 2019
• Archiving Yahoo Groups
  October 18, 2019
• Regularly Scheduled: Day-of Reminders
  October 09, 2019
• Comments are back!
  October 03, 2019
• Communication and Waking Hours
  October 1, 2019
• Persistent Sessions
  July 23, 2019
• Adventures in upstreaming
  June 18, 2019
• Openring
  June 17, 2019
• Thoughts on AMP
  April 19, 2019
• Backup Strategy
  January 22, 2019
• Virtual Wind Instruments
  June 29, 2018
• Floor Mouse
  June 28, 2018
• Handwriting for math etc
  May 28, 2018
• Getting into Programming
  May 15, 2018
• Ads on posts
  May 04, 2018
• AMP experiment non-results
  April 27, 2018
• Reworking Facebook Comment Inclusion
  April 26, 2018
• History of HTTPS Usage
  March 08, 2018
• Chord Shape as Input
  February 23, 2018
• Trying out AMP
  February 02, 2018
• Avoiding "From" in Email
  October 25, 2017
• Moving to HTTPS
  October 05, 2017
• Fixing SSH with RCN 1Gbps Service
  September 20, 2017
• Using Docs for Running Notes
  September 11, 2017
• Regularly Scheduled
  August 12, 2017
• Text-to-Speech Speed
  June 04, 2017
• Python Navigation in Emacs
  April 28, 2017
• Slack tool: predict
  March 17, 2017
• Diving into a floating point bug
  March 02, 2017
• Work Hardware Setup
  February 08, 2017
• Hit frequencies
  December 02, 2016
• Work Desktop Setup
  December 01, 2016
• Making things mobile friendly II
  November 30, 2016
• Making things mobile friendly
  November 27, 2016
• GitHub Resumes
  October 20, 2016
• Bash Argument Parsing and Quoting
  October 04, 2016
• 32-bit Chroots on Ubuntu LTS 12 and Centos 5
  July 22, 2016
• What's on our stage?
  June 13, 2016
• Change Here for Bus Connections
  June 12, 2016
• Remote Rounds
  June 11, 2016
• HTTPS Support
  April 13, 2016
• Floor Polishing Guys?
  March 21, 2016
• Dirname is Evil
  February 11, 2016
• Shortcuts in Emacs
  January 21, 2016
• Tempo Meter
  January 04, 2016
• Serf Error Codes
  October 21, 2015
• See Raw Headers with Netcat
  October 05, 2015
• Weissman Scores: Useful?
  September 23, 2015
• SRI against the Great Cannon?
  September 19, 2015
• Reminders
  August 22, 2015
• DoNotLink: Mostly Useless
  August 09, 2015
• What Do You Do Where?
  July 25, 2015
• Google Referrals HTTPS
  July 09, 2015
• Two Simple Fixes
  July 04, 2015
• Subway Synchronization Protocol
  June 17, 2015
• Preemptive Cache Validation: Pushing 304s
  May 19, 2015
• Hanabi
  May 11, 2015
• Bus Predictions: Open Source
  April 20, 2015
• Miswired Lights
  March 18, 2015
• Lightweight Bus Map
  February 24, 2015
• Distribution of Music
  February 15, 2015
• Styled Bus Predictions
  February 13, 2015
• I Like Upstart
  February 11, 2015
• Lightweight Bus Predictions Page
  February 10, 2015
• Bus Predictions Page
  February 09, 2015
• Subway-Surface Frequency
  February 05, 2015
• Serial Console
  February 01, 2015
• DIY Audio Casting
  January 27, 2015
• Other uses of Doodle
  January 19, 2015
• Picture Infrastructure
  January 15, 2015
• Page for icdiff
  December 07, 2014
• Ambient Bus Times
  December 04, 2014
• WebP Quality Settings
  November 26, 2014
• Compiling SSIM on Mac
  November 25, 2014
• Why Parse the User-Agent?
  November 22, 2014
• Flux Timing
  November 06, 2014
• Emacs Keybindings in Chrome Without Gnome
  November 04, 2014
• Moto 360 Review
  October 03, 2014
• Topical RSS Feeds
  September 30, 2014
• Fixing a DI Box
  September 07, 2014
• Defusing an Email Storm
  September 03, 2014
• Mark New Comments
  August 31, 2014
• 32-bit Chroot on CentOS
  August 21, 2014
• Is Gain Like A Balloon?
  August 11, 2014
• Audio from Video
  August 04, 2014
• Contra Weekend Heatmap
  August 01, 2014
• Contra Heatmap
  July 31, 2014
• Reference Contra Dance Sound System
  July 23, 2014
• Require Keyword Arguments
  July 13, 2014
• High DPI images with srcset
  June 09, 2014
• Trigger Warning DB
  May 31, 2014
• Run When Done
  May 20, 2014
• Eye Contact via Multiple Cameras
  May 16, 2014
• Malicious USB Sticks
  May 13, 2014
• Have Taken A Picture
  May 09, 2014
• Home With Color
  April 11, 2014
• Consistency for Progressive Automation
  April 05, 2014
• Slides from talk at NGINX summit
  March 06, 2014
• Repeated HTML Text Is Cheap
  February 19, 2014
• How do you get the PID in bash?
  January 27, 2014
• Compressing Dance Recordings With FLAC
  January 18, 2014
• Where Can I Dance?
  October 18, 2013
• The Date Link Convention
  September 09, 2013
• Decrypt All Https Traffic?
  August 30, 2013
• Smartphones Are Now Good Enough
  August 28, 2013
• How Much Can a Webpage Inflate?
  August 23, 2013
• Automatically Updating Apartment Map
  August 19, 2013
• Consistency in OntoNotes
  July 29, 2013
• Text-Only Fallback Browsing
  July 11, 2013
• Keeping websites up to date
  June 30, 2013
• How to run Diplomator
  June 24, 2013
• Is Unicode Safe?
  June 14, 2013
• Speeding up Sites at Google IO
  May 17, 2013
• Phone Costs
  May 04, 2013
• ngx_pagespeed: how does it work?
  April 29, 2013
• Better Mobile Support
  April 05, 2013
• 3G and HSPA+ on the Razr M with ATT or T-Mobile
  April 04, 2013
• Your Email Password Is Critical
  March 04, 2013
• Parsing HTML With Regular Expressions
  February 22, 2013
• Screwing up unsubscription
  February 20, 2013
• Abandoning Bottom-Posting
  February 16, 2013
• Minimal Personalization
  February 10, 2013
• Reverse RSS Feed
  February 08, 2013
• Apache doesn't cache htaccess configs
  February 05, 2013
• Efficient .htaccess
  February 02, 2013
• Unlinking Stereo Channels III
  January 15, 2013
• Unlinking Stereo Channels II
  January 10, 2013
• Razr M on T-Mobile
  January 02, 2013
• Unlinking Stereo Channels
  December 31, 2012
• VSL1818 Web Remote
  December 21, 2012
• ngx_pagespeed coming along
  December 20, 2012
• VSL Remote Protocol: Step 1
  December 16, 2012
• Audiobox vsl1818 Remote Control
  December 12, 2012
• A function that returns twice: fork()
  December 06, 2012
• Dual MicroUsb
  November 28, 2012
• AudioBox vsl1818 Recording Clicks
  November 27, 2012
• Make Pages Fast
  November 16, 2012
• Audio Interface + Laptop = Mixer
  November 01, 2012
• Emacs Auto-Revert Mode
  October 01, 2012
• HTML Expand To Fit
  September 06, 2012
• Apartment Price Map By Room
  July 27, 2012
• Quotation Detection
  July 20, 2012
• External Comment Integration Rewrite
  July 11, 2012
• The Right to be Forgotten
  June 20, 2012
• Live Music and Technology
  June 04, 2012
• Alt-Tab and Focus-Follows-Mouse
  June 02, 2012
• Electrical safety
  May 30, 2012
• Cars as raw materials
  May 28, 2012
• Emacs Wastes a Column
  May 20, 2012
• Globally Unique Names
  May 17, 2012
• Proposing via an online ad
  May 01, 2012
• Universal Undo
  April 10, 2012
• Touchscreen Touch Feedback
  March 16, 2012
• The Revenge of the IE Box Model?
  February 18, 2012
• You Should Be Logging Shell History
  February 13, 2012
• Caller control of phone ringer
  February 08, 2012
• Copying
  February 06, 2012
• Phones as Makeup Mirrors
  February 04, 2012
• Self Redirection
  January 28, 2012
• Android Sound Synthesis and Latency
  January 27, 2012
• The Advantage of Logging: Browser History
  January 23, 2012
• Libraries and Technology
  January 18, 2012
• Googlebot Running Javascript
  January 11, 2012
• Nextgen Voting Sites
  January 07, 2012
• Determining What People Want to See
  January 04, 2012
• Audio Logging: Package as a device?
  January 02, 2012
• Beats-per-minute Meter
  December 16, 2011
• Publicy and Notification
  November 29, 2011
• Log Everything: Audio and Video
  November 24, 2011
• Location Publishing
  November 22, 2011
• Design Testing
  November 19, 2011
• Tongue-o-Vision
  November 16, 2011
• Brain Rewiring and Tongue Vision
  October 30, 2011
• Simple Plotting Software?
  October 12, 2011
• An idea many people already had
  October 08, 2011
• Online Community Aging
  October 04, 2011
• There is such a thing as plain text
  September 30, 2011
• Schedule Into Org Mode
  August 25, 2011
• Learning Org Mode
  August 23, 2011
• External Comment Integration
  August 04, 2011
• Coordinating Comments
  August 02, 2011
• Facebook Dropping Notifications
  July 21, 2011
• Keyboard Keys Should Be Tiny Touchpads
  July 13, 2011
• Timestamp range in gnuplot
  June 20, 2011
• Boston Apartment Prices Map
  June 18, 2011
• Redirecting all subdomains to www in nginx with virtual hosting
  June 17, 2011
• Converting ISO 8061 datetimes to epoch timestamps
  May 13, 2011
• Reading Manpages On The Train
  May 12, 2011
• Facebook's Recent Comment Editing Feature
  April 07, 2011
• Focus Follows Mouse on OSX: A Weird Quirk
  April 06, 2011
• Scope and Ambiguous Assignments In Python
  March 21, 2011
• Javascript and Open in a New Tab
  March 12, 2011
• Running IE6, IE7, IE8 on OSX
  February 18, 2011
• Importing Python By Path
  February 17, 2011
• Making mbtaplot more useable
  February 15, 2011
• Taking Apart a Yamaha P85
  February 09, 2011
• Open Formats Are Nice: iCal
  January 25, 2011
• Horizontal Bar Graphs With Labels in Gnuplot
  January 10, 2011
• Significant Whitespace In Expressions
  January 08, 2011
• MultitouchMidi Screenshot
  January 07, 2011
• App Ready For Download: MultitouchMidi
  January 06, 2011
• Trackpad Synth: Video
  January 02, 2011
• Trackpad Synthesizer: Command Line Options
  December 26, 2010
• Trackpad Synthesizer: Added Velocity
  December 23, 2010
• Trackpad Synthesizer: Now a MIDI Controller
  December 22, 2010
• Macbook Trackpad Synthesizer
  December 20, 2010
• New Version of MBTA Plot
  December 19, 2010
• Thinking About the Right Way to Do Something
  November 15, 2010
• Bus Plotter VIII: Experimental Subway Support
  October 03, 2010
• Bus Plotter VII: Headsign Interpretation
  October 01, 2010
• Bus Plotter VI: Settings Chooser Page
  September 29, 2010
• Bus Plotter V: Settings Chooser Page
  September 27, 2010
• Bus Plotter IV: Extrapolate From Stop Predictions
  September 26, 2010
• Bus Plotter III: Client Side Extrapolation and Snap to Path
  September 25, 2010
• Bus Plotter II: Linear Extrapolation
  September 24, 2010
• MBTA Bus Plotter
  September 23, 2010
• Website wrangling scripts
  August 20, 2010
• Data Only Cell Phones
  August 13, 2010
• Shell History and the Value of Text Only Environments
  August 04, 2010
• Moved Programming Projects to Github
  August 03, 2010
• Added --head option to icdiff
  August 02, 2010
• How I do Email
  July 30, 2010
• Cache Invalidation
  July 28, 2010
• EeeKeyboard actually exists
  June 09, 2010
• Adaptive Windshield Tinting
  June 01, 2010
• Notifications that wait for conversational gaps
  May 30, 2010
• looper_sync now on github
  May 02, 2010
• Goodbye ChucK; hello straight C with JACK
  May 01, 2010
• More work on looper software
  April 26, 2010
• Work on looper pedal software
  April 20, 2010
• Making a looper pedal
  April 19, 2010
• Pdf Reflow From Scans
  March 13, 2010
• Keyboard first or display first?
  January 30, 2010
• Weird tech levels
  January 14, 2010
• Now with individual pages for entries
  January 12, 2010
• Retrogrouch
  December 22, 2009
• MBTA Service Frequency
  December 12, 2009
• iCal Format Schedule
  December 02, 2009
• Zonet ZEW1605A on Ubuntu Linux
  November 06, 2009
• Thinking about simulated annealing
  October 31, 2009
• Learning more about emacs
  October 29, 2009
• Exceptions in programming: asking forgiveness instead of permission
  October 26, 2009
• Narrow band television
  October 15, 2009
• The 'expand this here' * operator in python
  September 29, 2009
• List reply in mutt
  September 12, 2009
• Text only email stuff
  August 14, 2009
• Faster icdiff
  August 14, 2009
• eeepc
  July 3, 2009
• Shell usage
  July 2, 2009
• Sorting mixed lists of numbers and strings
  June 26, 2009
• Blink matching parens in bash
  May 6, 2009
• Hilbert PacMan
  May 6, 2009
• Introducing icdiff
  March 11, 2009
• What is in hindsight a foolish way to do generator expressions
  March 5, 2009
• Programming: Repurposeability
  February 23, 2009
• Argument ordering and programming speed
  February 5, 2009
• Reverse resolution of environment variables II
  January 28, 2009
• Bash quibbles
  January 23, 2009
• Colored grep
  January 19, 2009
• fix_path.c
  October 9, 2008
• fix_path.py
  October 6, 2008
• DSL working
  June 16, 2006
• DSL not working
  June 14, 2006
• PlayGUI 0-1-4
  June 12, 2006
• Webcam
  March 20, 2006
• PlayGUI on MPD
  January 22, 2006
• PlayGUI: a program that should use MPD
  January 19, 2006
• Titan assistant
  December 12, 2005
• PlayGUI fixes
  November 12, 2005
• Interfaces and Usability
  November 2, 2005
• Gaim Awaybox
  September 19, 2005
• PlayMusic
  August 29, 2005
• Gaim over ssh
  April 28, 2005
• Webpage up!
  September 17, 2004